When the author Thomas Hardy wrote Tess of the D’Urbervilles in 1891 he chose to set the novel’s dramatic conclusion Stonehengewhere Tess sleeps on one of the stones the night before she is arrested for murder.
What the author did not know, as he wrote in the study of his home, Max Gate in Dorchester, was that he sat right in the heart of a large henge-like enclosure that was even older than the famous monument on Salisbury Plain was.
Although invisible at ground level after millennia of ploughing, the enclosure still survives below Hardy’s garden. It was now given protection by the government as a scheduled monument, recognizing its status as a nationally important site.
Hardy knew nothing of the Dorset site’s significance when he began building a house of his own design in Dorchester, although the discovery of Roman and Iron Age burials during construction led him to believe it was an ancient burial ground. However, he found a large sarsen, which he called a “druid stone” and re-erected it in his garden, recognizing that the site also had a Neolithic past.
It was only when excavations were carried out in the 1980s, before the construction of a road next to the house, that archaeologists discovered what was still underground: a large circular Neolithic enclosure, or “proto-henge”, almost 100 meters in diameter, which was built in about 3,000 BC, or about the same time as the circular bank of earth that surrounds Stonehenge’s stone circles today, the earliest phase of the monument.
Almost half of the enclosure, known as Flagstones, was destroyed by the road scheme, but the remainder is preserved on the site of Max Gate, now owned by the National Trust.
A second dig in 2022 found evidence of activity dating back 500 years or more, making this one of the oldest sites in the southwest England.
“What came of it [excavation] was that it was a very, very important archaeological site,” said Martin Papworth, the National Trust archaeologist who led the project.
With similar sites in the area having the legal protection afforded by scheduling, it was clear that what remained of Flagstones should have the same protection, he said.
“We wanted that designation so the National Trust wouldn’t build a car park on it in the future,” Papworth said. “Not that they would, but you never know how things would change over time.”
He said he got an “electric charge” to find antler pick marks made by the original builders of the enclosure 5,000 years ago, while the Hardy connection made the site even more resonant.
“It’s that link that this story has between Hardy and his fascination with the past and time, and me being trapped in a trench, in this [monument] he didn’t know, under his driveway in front of his front door,” Papworth said.
Jill Guthrie, a listing adviser for Historic England, said: “Some people might ask why we’re scheduling something that we only have half of, but it really is such a rare type of monument, especially from the Neolithic period. There’s only a dozen similar sites of similar date have been identified in the rest of Britain.”
She said scheduling would “preserve and protect the buried archeology for the benefit of present and future generations, and that is the important thing”.
